Colony Survival News

This week, we've implemented and changed some things that should be visible a lot of the time! Firstly, we changed one of our main fonts. It was kinda runic, and we thought it fit the medieval / Viking aesthetic pretty well. But it only had capital letters, so a lot of things in the UI were WRITTEN LIKE THIS.

We experiment with a couple of different fonts that support both regular and capital letters, and we found one we were pretty fond of. It lacks the runic inspiration, but we really like how it changes the UI. It’s more legible, and calmer - not like someone is screaming at you.

Here’s an example of the main menu with both the old font (on top) and the new font (below):



In the above example, it's just a simple font change. But in the next example, you can see how it combines with the other UI changes. We believe it’s a major step in the right direction, and that it’s both aesthetically and functionally superior. But we still love to hear your feedback!



And while we’re comparing old and new UIs, here’s a final example. Apart from a complete revamp of the style, it also clarifies the old system by dividing it up into infinite and limited trades.



There’s another minor feature that’s visible a majority of the time: the crosshair. We have never given it much thought, but are trying to improve it now. We’re planning to turn it into a dynamic crosshair, one that changes slightly to fit different situations. For example, here are four states that could be reflected in the crosshair:

• You’re aiming at the air/distant blocks that can’t be touched from your current position
  
• You’re aiming at a close block that will be removed if you click
  
• You’re aiming at a job block and right-clicking will open a new menu
  
• You’re aiming at the banner and right-clicking will open the linked menu

It’s a subtle improvement, but it should make the game both more intuitive and “feel more professional” :)

The major changes of 0.7.4 are finished now. We’re “stitching it up” again. Zun’s testing the game on Mac & Linux, and the updated eye adaptation seems to be wonky on Linux right now. He’s also got to check mods, and the way the game handles outdated ones. We’re expecting this to take roughly two weeks, and hopefully the update will be released then!



Since shortly after the release of the game, we’ve hosted a Discord server, and we feel like it has been tremendously helpful. It has led to a lot of insightful discussions about the game and we’ve received hundreds of bug reports there. Some people have stuck around for years, even when they weren’t playing Colony Survival very actively anymore, and we’ve got to know them a bit more personally. That’s why we’ve also got off-topic channels, to discuss topics that aren’t directly related to the game (although anything could potentially lead to new features!).

2020 has been an intense year, with a deadly virus, deadly police brutality and deadly riots. This has led to some heated debates, which have caused more frequent discussions about our moderation policies. How best to deal with this? We’ve discussed multiple solutions.

A.) Ban Politics

It’s a relatively common suggestion. Politics can be quite inflammatory, and apparently, many other Discord servers forbid the discussion of it. But to us, this seems quite impractical. Take for example COVID-19 and climate change. These are subjects that have been politicized. Sharing any facts related to these topics could be construed as being in favor of or opposed to certain policies. This means we’d have to ban any discussion of these topics. And the full list of topics that would have to be banned would be endless, because nearly any topic is tangentially related to politics.

B.) Ban a list of Controversial Subjects

So it seems it’s not practical to ban all political subjects. But not all political subjects are highly controversial! So we could ban only the controversial ones.

But making that list of controversial subjects would be extremely subjective. We’re Dutch, and what’s controversial here isn’t controversial in the USA, and vice versa. Every nation, every group, every individual has a list of subjects they consider to be controversial. Even relatively simple things like facemasks have become controversial!

So “The List of Banned Controversial Subjects” would be very controversial and subjective itself, and will dissatisfy a lot of people.

C.) Ban Partisanship

Over the years, we’ve seen and moderated a lot of discussions. We’ve seen debates about tricky, complicated subjects go very well. We’ve seen debates about very benign topics go completely wrong and turn hostile. Of course, “stay respectful of the people you’re debating with” is the foremost rule that prevents discussions from turning sour. But we’ve noticed something else that strongly correlates with debates going wrong.

If we had to explain that thing in one word it would be “partisanship”. Especially in the US, many topics are tied to political parties, and each party is connected to a long range of judgements.

You’d like to see more affordable healthcare? You must be a Democrat, and thus you’re an evil commie who will lead the country to totalitarianism and collapse.
You’re critical of unlimited immigration? You must be a Republican, and thus you’re a fascist nazi who wants to physically abuse all minorities.

Perhaps the other person actually does support that party, and perhaps giving that party power will indeed lead to bad outcomes. But we’ve now seen both sides vilify the other side plenty of times while skipping over actual, practical topics. That vilification itself, that refusal to talk about the details of complicated topics, seems to be the main problem leading towards bad outcomes.

Words often don’t mean what they mean at face value. We say things not merely to communicate the spoken facts, but to signal allegiance to X or opposition to Y. We say things, not because they are true, but to make friends - and enemies! And that’s how we tend to interpret things as well. When somebody is critical, we’re quick to assume they dislike us.

So this partisanship and tribalism comes to us humans very naturally. But that doesn’t mean we’ve got to give in to these feelings, or avoid triggering them in all circumstances. We think the best approach to moderating our off-topic channels is to encourage some maturity, not to ban specific subjects. When you’re discussing sensitive topics and run in some opposition, don’t talk or read in the way mentioned in the paragraph above. Stick to the facts. When somebody advocates violence or extremely disturbed things, ping us, moderators and admins. But for other topics: don’t read too much into it. Don’t assume what’s not stated. Don’t widen the discussion to how you think “their side” is always wrong and immoral. Debate the specifics of the issue itself.

When the guidelines above are followed by both sides, debates tend to stay relatively objective and respectful, and both active participants and passive readers learn something. But when these principles are ignored, things tend to escalate quickly towards a completely unproductive, unfun, hostile situation.

In the last few weeks, we’ve tried to nip partisanship in the bud, whenever it occurs, from all sides of the political spectrum. This has displeased people both on the left ánd on the right, so we feel like we’re acting pretty reasonably. We hope we can foster a culture of rationally and respectfully debating the “facts on the ground", instead of hosting an ideological WW1-battlefield. This is a very complex topic, and political depolarization isn’t something we as a culture seem to have figured out yet, so all of your feedback is welcome!

Here are three useful articles that we’ve based our policies on:
Reporting the Results of the Reality Die and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists You need more Buckets Feel free to skip towards “Part 2: Simulacrum”

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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This morning started with a long call between me and Zun. He thought he had perhaps had a migraine attack in the middle of the night, and he had woken up pretty groggy. Then we talked about the progress of the week and what to write in the Friday Blog. At the end of the call, at the start of this afternoon… I suddenly got a migraine attack. Luckily, these rarely last longer than 4-5 hours, so we’re still able to put out a Friday Blog on Friday - even if it’s Friday evening :) But this will be a short one.

[All changes concern the internal dev build and have not been released yet]

Zun has updated the version of Unity that Colony Survival runs on. We were still using Unity 2018, but we’ve now gone to Unity 2019. That’s the awesome thing about Unity - it makes it possible to actually skip 2020. This new version upgrades some post processing effects like Eye Adaptation and Anti-Aliasing. They also required some tweaking, so the game looks slightly different now. Better, IMHO! The screenshot above is made with the 2019 version.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though. Unity 2019 doesn't support the Linux 32 bit version of the game, so it’ll be deprecated with the next update. Luckily, this affects only a very small percentage of our playerbase because the vast majority of Linux users are on 64 bit systems. Our stated minimum system requirements already recommended 64-bit Linux for years.

It has also caused issues with the torch shader for certain Mac configurations. Zun has found and implemented a workaround! Last but not least, he has also ported the features that used Rust to now use Unity Burst. It won't have a noticeable impact now, but it's a good starting point for future developments.

That’s it for today, enjoy your weekend, don’t get COVID and certainly don’t spread it :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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This week, progress on the interface has continued. We’re currently not working on any revolutionary new stuff that totally changes how the game works, but we’re adding a lot of polish and small little tweaks that fix common demands. One example is the converter that can make singleplayer worlds suitable for multiplayer and vice versa. Another example we’ve been looking at this week is making the UI properly suitable for 4K monitors.

Below is an image that contrasts the old 0.7.3 Colony Menu (first half) with the planned 0.7.4 Colony Menu (unexpectedly, the second half). In our current internal dev build, it does look close to that and the functionality is there! Many other UI elements have been overhauled in a similar way.





In previous blogs, we’ve been discussing our ideas and plans to overhaul some core elements of the current gameplay. Decoupling the size of the monster threat and the amount of required happiness items from the amount of colonists still sounds like a good idea to us, but as many of you have warned us, the change has to be implemented very carefully. It could easily backfire. We’re still fine-tuning our plans!

In last week’s comments, we got multiple replies that suggested an interesting idea. They wanted to build wider. Instead of multiple small colonies, or a very tall one, a bigger colony with more land area. This requires a larger safe zone. There even was some suggestion that this was the case in the past. Although the way monsters spawn has changed a bit, it shouldn’t be forcing players to build a more constrained colony?

Anyway, we like the idea of larger safe zones, allowing players to build larger colonies that still look good (meaning they don’t rely on gigantic farm towers). But this also requires better, more efficient pathfinding, as it quickly gets very expensive when you increase the search radius. Potentially, we could limit colonists to not even search the whole colony for a bed - if a bed isn’t in a decent range of their corner of the (large) colony, they’ll start complaining.

It could also require a different way of fighting monsters, if the distance from the banner to the “unsafe zone” gets too large. Perhaps you’ll need to place “monster-banners” at the edges of your colony, perhaps you’ll have to build a “monster-portal” and a containment facility in the middle of your colony to unlock a much larger safe zone. There are lots of discussions about the future of the game happening these weeks! And we do listen to your input, so please keep sharing it :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Pathros

Last week’s blog announced a pretty dramatic plan to uncouple the amount of monsters and unhappiness from the amount of currently recruited colonists. We still had some questions about the precise implementation though, and we received a lot of comments to help us with that! We’re now thinking of determining a “Civilization Level” that is linked to multiple factors like unlocked tech, amount of colonists recruited, and “monster magnets”, special monuments that quickly raise your Civilization Level. These monuments take quite some time and resources to craft, and when they’re placed in the world they rapidly raise your Civilization Level. When they’re removed, the monuments are destroyed (so you can’t rapidly place and remove them without cost), and your Civilization Level will drop again. A high Civilization Level will allow you to unlock new tech and continue your progress, but it will also attract more monsters and increase the demand for happiness items.

Zun has continued revamping the UI. It’s going to be a very substantial update that will add new UI features, reorganize older features and improve the look of a lot of UI elements.





This part of the blog will concern wider societal problems that are certainly tied to us and our work indirectly, but are not directly related. If you strictly want game-related updates, stop reading here.

This week, we arrived in the second half of 2020. We don’t want to adopt any controversial viewpoints, but I guess we can all be in agreement that up to this point, in regards to world events, the year has been intense, suboptimal and worrisome.

The contrast got particularly big when I visited the Waterloopbos last Sunday (see pic above). Large parts of the Netherlands lie below sea level, so they need decent protection or they will flood. Currently, we mostly rely on computer simulations to test old and new coast defenses, but in the 20th century we built physical scale models and tested them with real water. The Waterloopbos was one such place where these models were built. Here’s Tom Scott visiting it right before Covid-19:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFkoLYrJGCM
Apparently, according to Dutch law the government must ensure our water defenses are prepared for weather events that are so bad they only occur once every 10,000 years. At the Waterloopbos, technical experts made sure our country was ready for that.

I can be pretty skeptical about the Dutch government, it’s not perfect, but not once in my life have I feared flooding and after 27 years of inhabiting and roaming this country I haven’t got a single complaint in regards to water management. There have been a couple of instances where water rose to a high point and floodplains that seldomly saw action got filled, but that only increased my faith that things are managed decently.

When I walked through the Waterloopbos, I noticed a skilled level of engineering and knowledge of water that far exceeds my own. I have no reason to doubt them, and I don’t know any Dutch person who does. It’s not a politicized, partisan issue. Companies don’t have to make statements about it. Flooding is bad, we need well-funded experts to stop it, and that’s what was organized. And thus, we don’t have to worry about it and can focus on other things, like developing games.

That’s the sanity that I was used to. We reach an agreement about which risks we want to prevent, we assign a bunch of experts to do so, problem solved, and we can all focus on our daily lives.

Things seem to be going a lot different in 2020. Perhaps it’s because we’ve grown older and it’s par for the course to realize things aren’t perfect. Perhaps we’re exaggerating problems that have always existed. But we feel like there’s a wider consensus that things are going off the rails.



Covid-19 seems to be a massive problem. In Europe and the US, over 300,000 people have died, despite invasive and disruptive measures that heavily disrupt the economy and people’s well-being. This situation was not inevitable: countries like South Korea (282 deaths), Mongolia (0 deaths), Taiwan (7 deaths) and Vietnam (0 deaths) prove that it’s possible to successfully and quickly contain and prevent the further spread of the virus. Key ingredients seem to be a quick response time, the widespread adoption of facemasks and large amounts of testing.

The societal and economic destabilization, compounded by pre-existing problems, seems to have reached a boiling point in the US. Legitimate issues have led to peaceful protests, but also to violent riots, destruction and increased polarization and partisanship. To a lesser degree, these same issues are spilling over to Europe.

We’re seriously worried about these issues. And we’re trying to look for a root cause. Strong systems don’t collapse randomly: at first, they get hollowed out. Did our systems get hollow? Why? How hollow are they? Can they be fixed, and how? These are very complex questions, and we don’t have all the answers. We don’t believe any single person, party or movement has them either. We’re probably going to require a whole lot of listening and talking, and as little partisanship as we can manage.

One of the things we believe is relevant is a transition from traditional media to new media. Releasing Colony Survival gave us some experience with that. If you’re interested in hearing about that, we’ll write about it in a future Friday Blog. But this is probably already getting quite controversial, so let us know how you feel about this blog first! Do you worry about the direction the world is heading in? Should we be saying anything about this subject at all? Tell us, here or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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"Borg Invasion!" by Landru

In the past weeks & months, we've thought a lot about improving the ‘gameplay flow’ of Colony Survival. In past blogs, we’ve already shared a lot of our ideas, and we’ve received a lot of great feedback. Thanks for that!

This week, we were suddenly gripped by a new idea that would shake things up dramatically. We want to uncouple the size of the nightly monster assault and the amount of happiness you’ve got to generate from the amount of colonists currently in your colony. Currently, the amount of monsters that spawns at night is linked directly to the amount of colonists, and every colonist present in your colony generates “+1 Unhappiness by Overpopulation”, which requires you to distribute more and more happiness items.

We organized things like this to keep the challenge of the game appropriate at all sizes. As you grow your colony, the size of the challenge grows with you. But you run into a bit of the same problem as the one in Skyrim. Enemies in Skyrim get stronger as you increase your level. This makes it very important to make sure you don’t “waste” levels. Imagine boosting your Enchanting very high but not using it to craft powerful gear. Enemies will have become stronger, but you didn’t. The same thing happens in Colony Survival. If you recruit a bunch of colonists but you don’t put them to work efficiently, you’ll have made the game quite difficult. On the other hand, if you do work very efficiently and stay relatively small, the game will be a lot easier - while you’re missing out on some core gameplay!

So we’re thinking of completely changing that system. Let’s give an example. At certain in-game thresholds, we expect players to have roughly X amount of colonists. For crossbows, that’s something like 50-100, for matchlock guns more like 150-250. We want to add new stages of the game that will ultimately require players to have around 800-1000 colonists.

But instead of making it so that the amount of monsters and the amount of required happiness items are tied directly to the amount of colonists you have, we could tie it to these stages. Around the point you unlock crossbows, you’ll get assaulted by monsters as if you’ve got 75 colonists. With matchlock guns, the game will act as if you’ve got 200 colonists. And when you progress to printing presses and steam engines, it’ll be as if you’ve got hundreds of colonists more.

You could run a tight, efficient colony that deals with these challenges with lower amounts of colonists. On the other hand, players are free to expand to far larger numbers and “brute-force” these challenges. Why solve a problem with 500 efficient colonists when 1000 inefficient colonists can do the same?



We really like the sound of these ideas, but we’ve got a hard time working out the details. We’re thinking of multiple approaches.

A.) Meta-levels

In the overhauled Colony Survival, there will be a ‘Repeating Scientist’, and to progress, you’ve got to upgrade your jobs from level 1 to level 5, 10, 15, 20, etcetera. There could be a “meta-level” that has to be reached before you can unlock them. To get Guard Level 5 / Health Level 5 / Banner Range Level 5, you need Meta-Level 5. Every time you upgrade the Meta-Level, more and stronger monsters will assault your colony, and you’ll need to produce more and more happiness items.

Pros

• Does the job
  
• Pretty straightforward

Cons

• Adds another level of numbers and abstractions
  
• How to deal with setbacks? What if monsters overwhelm your defenses and slaughter half of your colonists?
  
• It strongly favors a balanced approach where everything is leveled to [current meta-level] before upgrading to [next meta-level] above colonies that are more specialized in certain things

B.) Meta-levels but this time it’s different

There’s still something like the meta-level that has to be increased, but instead of just using regular Data-Science-Bags-thingies, you’ll have to use resources/currencies that are only earned by specific tasks like slaughtering monsters and distributing happiness items. Players can voluntarily increase and decrease the size of monster attacks. If they want to improve at a decent pace, they’ll have to choose to fight relatively large monster attacks.

Pros

• Voluntarism!
  
• Liberty!
  
• More rewards/resources/currencies!

Cons

• A lot of players are going to set the challenge very low and progress in a very slow, grinding manner, and then complain the game is boring
  
• If the monsters are so easy to control, the challenge is way less exciting

C.) A more indirect way like pollution

Factorio has a complex system where the monster threat is connected to pollution. As you increase the size of the factory and keep it running for hours and hours, the pollution slowly spreads across the map, triggering more and more alien colonies to send attackers in your direction. We could connect the challenges in CS to something else in such an indirect way as well.

Pros

• ”It Just Works”, doesn’t require players to figure out new systems
  
• Could automatically scale up and down

Cons

• What exactly will we tie the system to? It will discourage doing that activity, like it currently discourages recruiting colonists.

We haven’t found a perfect system yet, so we’re still pondering and discussing the subject. We’d love to have your opinion about the systems mentioned above, and if you’ve got a better idea, please share it!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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